Freethought Festival is rocking

This is an exceptionally well-run event. Even Skepticon could pick up some pointers from this event (and that’s saying quite a lot).

I started the day by catching up with Richard Carrier. I also got to meet Valerie Tarico (whom I have to follow today, ugh). She is super sweet and a very attentive listener. If you’ve not read her work, you should.

Chris Calvey opened things at the conference later in the day with a talk about the morality of abortion. I always love seeing new speakers take the stage because every once in a while you get a real gem like his talk when you weren’t expecting it. When the talk goes on youtube I will definitely post it.

Darrel Ray also tore it up. As usual.

After the first night’s session of talks we made our way to the Rathskeller for drinking and shenanigans. Matt Dillahunty showed up, after which he and I had a magic trick dick measuring contest (he won, the man’s good). But everybody was amused.

I also got to spend some time with fellow FtBers Brianne Bilyeu and Stephanie Zvan. Those two are just…wonderful. Brilliant and extremely nice. How such sweet people got into the evil atheist empire I’ll never know. Evil needs standards.

James Crofft is here as well, being all nice and wrong like usual. We found out that we both play Star Wars: The Old Republic. Irony: he plays sith, I play a light-side smuggler for the Republic. #TrueColors Here he is being all not straight all over me.

My sleight-of-hand got me a smooch from a reader. This is Otto, should you ever see her in the comments. She’s pretty keen. She gave me beer. I drank it.

While doing magic, Matt outed me as a singer and immediately everybody demanded I sing. I sang a little bit in Latin, German, and Italian (someone asked for French, which I can do, but French is the dumbest language of all time, so I didn’t). After I finished, some guy from a group that wasn’t ours came over and gave me a medal and thanked me for adding culture to his group’s evening.

It wouldn’t fit over my head, so I draped it around my arm. You can’t see, but it says “winner.” I’m a winner.

My talk is today at 10:15am. I have 66 slides for a 25 minute talk. This is how public speakers overcompensate.

Or maybe it’s because PZ Myers is following me so I don’t care if I eat into his time. The revolution starts now!!!